Day 10: Steel Trap

The first thing I was thinking upon watching the recently released straight-to-DVD flick Steel Trap was that the cast looked so old. After that, I realized that they just looked old for a horror movie, as the typical cast of a typical horror movie are about 21 years old. Steel Trap sets itself apart by having a cast of real adults instead of overgrown teens. Unfortunately, this is the best thing I can say about this stinking pile of crap.

Steel Trap starts us off with an entertainment industry New Years Eve party on the top floor of an abandoned office building. Apparently, wealthy studio executives can’t afford a decent hotel or club. It’s at this party that we meet our protagonists. We have Adam the Arrogant Suit with Party Girl Melanie, Nicole the Advice Columnist and her boyfriend Robert, Kathy the Celebrity Chef, Pam the TV Exec, and Wade the Rock Star who has “fucked so many skanks it’s gotten old”. You now know everything about the characters.

After the new year has been rung in, the Scooby gang each get a text message inviting them to another party on a different floor. Of course, they go and find a series of nursery rhyme clues to follow. Only after finding a severed pig’s head do they think that maybe something is wrong.

And wrong it is. The gang find themselves trapped on the floor with low-tech booby traps and a masked killer stalking them. As you may have guessed, they die off one by one until the killer is revealed. (At one point, Nicole misspeaks a line giving a clue to the killer’s identity.)

People who know me know that I love horror movies. I even love bad horror movies. As Steel Trap goes, it’s pretty generic. It’s basically a horror-by-numbers kind of flick. The characters fall into their distinct types: the pompous jerk, the scaredy-cat, the brassy chick, etc. Even that I could’ve dealt with if the characters hadn’t been so goddamned annoying.

The most annoying trait we can assign to Gen Xers was the overuse of sarcasm. Like garlic, a little sarcasm can spice up a scene quite a bit, but with too much of it, the whole thing reeks. And brother, let me tell you, these characters never stop being sarcastic for one second. Even as a MASKED PSYCHO is stalking them, they keep on making sarcastic remarks at each other. I think the screenwriters thought it would make us think that the characters are witty and cool. Instead, it just made me happier when they inevitably got killed off. The camp counselors at Camp Blood weren’t this annoying.

By the ending, when the killer and motive has been revealed, I didn’t care. Even worse, the revelation was done in an even more sarcastic way that resembled a bad stand-up act more than what could have been a chilling scene about grudges and revenge. I honestly wished I had used the time watching this movie for something more productive.

My recommendation is that you pass on seeing Steel Trap. If you want a good horror flick about people trapped on a floor of a building, check out the far funnier and quirkier, but no less bloody film, Botched, starring Stephen Dorff.

Day 9: The Birthday

You ever have one of those horrible days where every little thing goes wrong and you feel like you’re totally out of sync with the world? Well, that’s the kind of day that Norman Forrester (Corey Feldman) is having in the stylish, quirky-as-hell 2004 film, The Birthday by Spanish director Eugenio Mira.

Norman Forrester is a nebbish man who is totally in love with his domineering, neglectful girlfriend, Alison Fulton (Erica Prior). This night being the first time he’s seen her since her trip to Europe, he has a special gift he wants to give her, but she’s so preoccupied with everything being perfect for her father’s birthday party, she never takes a spare moment to listen to Norman stammer his way through what he wants to say. Instead, she pushes him out of her hotel room and sends him downstairs to wait for her.

At the party, Norman is constantly pushed around by Alison’s highly eccentric family. While all of this is going on, the waitstaff are ominously going about their duties, pushing large boxes from room to room and “accidentally” keeping the hotel at a chilly temperature. After Norman suffers through a conversation about dolphins and pamphlets, he decides to leave for a bit and soon finds himself embroiled in some secret plot to foil a dangerous cult that’s trying to bring their evil god to life in the physical world.

Throughout the whole film, Feldman nervously stumbles from one bizarre situation to the next, all the while freaking out about how to stop the end of the world. He speaks in such a strange Jerry-Lewis-meets-NYC-Cabbie voice that no one ever listens to him. I have to say, I was actually impressed with Feldman in this movie. If only he could get some decent roles, maybe he could shed himself of that cheesy image from his youth. I don’t think doing a role in the new Lost Boys movie will help on that front.

The whole movie is stylishly done. The sets are brilliant and beautiful, rendered in a lush 50’s Hollywood style as only a great production designer could do. Everything was shot on a sound stage, so the camera is able to make these lovely tracking shots and the lighting is incredible. Even if you think the story is dumb, you could lose yourself in the look and feel of the film.

Unfortunately, Mira’s filmography is very, very brief. I’m really interested in seeing what he brings us in the future.

Day 8: Death to Smoochy

Danny DeVito’s 2002 comedy-noir, Death to Smoochy, was panned heavily by the critics when it was released. Roger Ebert gave it only one star when he trashed it. You can read that review in his book, Your Movie Sucks. Ouch.

Personally, I think this movie deserves a second look. Sure, it’s a bit flawed, but it’s a pretty scathing satire of how the corporate nature of show business takes things that can be beneficial to people and twist it around to sell “sugar and cheap plastic.” Death to Smoochy is a film with a few flaws, but it’s not a horrible failure.

When popular kid’s show personality Rainbow Randolph (Robin Williams) is busted by the feds for accepting bribes to put kids on camera, the network needs a replacement to fill the time slot who is squeaky-clean free of scandal. They find ubër-idealist Sheldon Mopes (Edward Norton) who is Smoochy the Rhino.

Sheldon is the ultimate idealistic guy. He plays music at the local methadone clinic and tries to get people into soy-based organic food products. When he gets the time-slot, he constantly fights against the capitalist agenda of the network. He rejects the need for all the merchandising and whatnot.

However, the children’s entertainment business is a deadly, corrupt world. Sheldon soon finds himself involved with the Irish mob, threatened by a crooked charity scam, and stalked by Randolph. When Sheldon takes on Burke (Danny DeVito) as his agent, Burke’s first action is to give Sheldon a gun.

While this movie is funny and definitely worth the watching, it does have a few flaws. The first of which is that Sheldon’s conflicts seem to keep resolving themselves without him actually doing anything. Every time he’s in hot water, a few scenes later, everything gets sorted out by someone else. Sheldon also never has a crisis of character; he never really wonders if his idealism is a chased windmill. In fact, his motto is “You can’t change the world, but you can make a dit.”

The film also felt long. It’s only 109 minutes, but it felt like it was over two hours. I think part of the problem here was in the pacing and structure of the movie. There were so many crises solved by someone else, there was never a true build to something that could be called a climax. I think some more time I the rewriting stage and in the editing room would’ve made a tighter, better film.

All in all though, I’d say it was a funny film that hit on some of the right spots. Definitely not going to be a classic, but worth a rental.

Day 7: WALL-E

Almost every elementary screenwriting textbook says that the magic of story is that it serves as the candy coating for the message you’re getting the audience to take. Usually, the reason a movie may be considered bad is because the filmmaker isn’t sure what their message is (could be a result of the Hollywood practice of having multiple screenwriters doing revisions) or because the filmmaker is more about presenting a spectacle than a meaningful theme. (Think of a bad action movie like Ghost Rider. Did that have anything meaningful to contribute?)

WALL-E, the latest Pixar animated feature is brilliant because it presents a good story, brilliant spectacle, and actually has something to say, much to the dissatisfaction of Republican bloggers and pundits. (Honestly, to the Republicans just think everything is an attack on America?)

WALL-E is the last functioning robot on a ruined planet Earth. 700 years prior, all of human kind took a five year space cruise while the robots were left behind to clean up the massive mess on a highly toxic scale. Over time, the other robots broke down and our lone Wall-E dutifully continues his lone directive, takes care of his pet cockroach, and watches clips of My Fair Lady, dreaming of not being alone.

While out compacting and piling garbage into a skyscraper-high tower, a rocket ship shows up and drops of a sleeker-looking robot that resembles the next model of iPod. (In fact, most of the robots in this movie look like they were designed by Apple.) Named EV-A, it takes no time for Wall-E to develop a robot crush.

The plot progresses and soon Wall-E is on the cruise ship. The future is a scary one, my friends. People have developed over the centuries into obese blobs in hoverchairs. Everything they eat or drink is sucked out of a cup with straw. Their chairs function as iPhones and no one notices their surroundings. Children are raised and taught by robots touting the Buy ‘N’ Large brand. People do nothing more than consume; progress has halted. You have to wonder at this point if the human race is worth the effort.

As I mentioned earlier, the Republican bloggers and pundits are vilifying this movie for its depiction of a polluted world and harsh criticism of the culture of over-consumption. They proclaim that the film is pessimistic and un—American. I, however, actually watched the film and found that this film may have been a cautionary tale of a possible future we’re heading for, but in the end, the main message was one of hope. Yes, things may be bleak, but they can be changed. If you see this movie, make sure to watch the animated sequence during the ending credits. It is the true epilogue of the film.

One final thing: while in the theater, I was surprised to see that the majority of the audience were adults. Usually a G-rated screening is filled with kids who can’t keep their attention focused and stroller-pushers who talk to each other. Wall-E’s screening was way different than I had expected.

Day 6: Hancock

Day 6: Hancock

I’ve always thought that Highlander was a great movie. One of the reasons for this is that there’s no Perfectly-Plausible-Explanation (or PPE for short) for why people like the Highlander are immortal. They’re just born that way. So of course, I absolutely hated Highlander 2 when the screenwriter decided to offer the PPE of the immortals being some sort of exiled space alien. Had they not bothered with the lame need for an origin, we might have had something better.

Hancock is like Highlander in that the movie is a fun popcorn flick until it decides to get into the origin story. Once it reaches that point (which just so happens to be the Hollywood-standard halfway turning point) the movie goes south.

Will Smith plays the title character, John Hancock, an alcoholic with super powers who fights crime, but does it pretty sloppy. While stopping a high speed chase, he causes 9 million dollars worth of property damage. While that might look cool in movies and comic books, LA taxpayers aren’t too thrilled.

Hancock later saves the life of Ray Embrey (Justin Bateman) who is a PR guy trying to sign corporations onto a charitable cause, but has no luck. Ray offers to remake Hancock’s public image so he’ll be loved by the people. This leads to Hancock doing time for past transgressions in hopes that when the crime rates rise, the city will miss him and release him early. This is exactly what happens.

Enter the newly refashioned Hancock, complete in X-Man style uniform, to stop a preposterous bank robbery scheme in which the robbers have military style weaponry and high explosives strapped to every hostage. I guess they need to rob banks to fun their bank robbing.

Now, had the movie stayed in the realm of being about a superhero trying to make himself over to be welcomed by the public, we could’ve had a good movie. There was a lot to work with. Unfortunately, execs in story meetings had other ideas. Without saying too much, let’s just say that they really screw the pooch with a convoluted story about immortals with more than a few plot holes about the mechanics of Hancock’s powers.

I really, really wish I could understand the mind of the Hollywood screenwriter. I mean, how is it that they constantly have a theme to delve into only to avoid it in favor of some stupid plot twist? Do they just think that the public will fall for the shallow gimmick? It baffles the mind.

Day 5: The Ruins

I’m one of those curmudgeonly people that always seems to get annoyed by others. I know I’m just too high-strung, but when I’m out in public, I’m constantly ticked off by people who seem like they were taught how to socialize with others by a drunk NASCAR fan. One group in particular that annoys me are young, arrogant white college kids of privilege.

It’s been said that films work because of their closeness to dreams. Freud even said that dreams were mainly wish-fulfillment. In that case, The Ruins, the 2008 film directed by Carter Smith and starring Jena Malone (who was in Donnie Darko) is the wish-fulfilling dream for me.

Our story starts with four college kids in Mexico for vacation. We have Amy (Jena Malone) who seems to pop on glasses when she needs to look smart for something, Jeff (Jonathan Tucker) the pre-med student, Stacy (Laura Ramsay) who is there to show the required gratuitous boobs, and Eric (Shawn Ashmore) because you need one guy who looks like a stoner. I’d offer more description if I could, but these characters have nothing unique about them worth describing. We never get to know anything deeper about them other than Amy and Stacy are, like totally, BFFs and that Jeff is a pre-med student.

Our over-worked and stressed college kids of privilege are relaxing by a hotel pool when they meet Methias (Joe Anderson), a German who just happens to be visiting his archeologist brother at this Aztec pyramid that’s, get this… NOT ON THE MAP! After having only known each other 30 seconds, Methias invites the four to join him. Well, it turns out that the kids didn’t want to do anything touristy while in Mexico (apparently lounging by a hotel pool, ordering room service, and drinking on the beach isn’t touristy) but since this ruin ISN’T ON THE MAP, what the hell.

Once at the titular ruins, things go wrong as locals sequester the Scooby gang to the pyramid. You see, the ruins are covered in the vines of a man-eating plant that exhibits some major intelligence. The vines attack and confuse our heroes, picking them off as the movie progresses.

The arrogance I mentioned earlier is manifested most clearly in the character of pre—med Jeff. Being Mr. Future Doctor, his interactions with everyone is that of a smug superiority, When trying to hire a ride out to the ruins, the Mexican (with grumpy dog and beat-up pick-up truck) says “That place is no good.’ Instead of even asking what he means, he just shrugs and smugly offers the guy more money. He tries the same tactic later when the locals start enforcing the quarantine on the kids. It doesn’t work, but he’s not worried because this “doesn’t happen to Americans.”

After having watched this, I can’t see how the vines are really all that scary. The characters do worse horror to each other than the vines ever do. In fact, the vines are more like natural predators, picking off the weak and the sick. Throughout the film, all I kept asking was, “Why haven’t the locals just covered the damn things with a ton of herbicide if they’re such a threat?” Unfortunately, the plot needs the vines, so no herbicide.

This movie could’ve been better if the characters had actually had more personality other than “partygoer”. Other than that, it was an okay flick.

Day 4: 24 Hrs. on Craigslist

I didn't feel like watching a long movie today, so I settled down with the short (80 min.) documentary, 24 Hours on Craigslist. It was released in 2005 and directed by Michael Ferris Gibson, who was an executive producer on the highly boring horror film, The Hamiltons.

24 Hours is a pretty basic documentary. People who used Craigslist in San Francisco (where CL started) had the option to be part of the film, allowing a crew to come out and interview them about their posting, what CL is all about, etc. For the most part, it's a lot of talking heads, but it keeps moving quick enough to not get boring.

The main focus of the doc seems to be the diverse range of people who use the site. You have the drag queen who wants to front a 70's rock-style band as Ethel Merman. You have the masseuse who also stars in gay porn. You have a Vietnam Vet with redneck sensibilities looking for a 270 lb woman to love. Some of the people are interesting, such as the "Metal Chef" who names all of his dishes after Slayer songs, and some of them are highly annoying, such as the female Chinese painter whose idea of high art is painting sexual innuendos into copies of religious Renaissance works. (Yawn.)

Thankfully, Gibson doesn't make the whole film into a sideshow attraction. I think that he's mainly interested in showing how technology has made it easier for people to connect and get things done or help each other out. Thanks to a service such as CL, people find work, trade consumer goods (instead of filling landfills), form bands, find housing, find love, etc. At one point, a new age spiritualist talks about how the internet and something like CL is a modern miracle that we just think of as an everyday life thing. (He likened it to a modern day Tower of Babel.)

My only real critique of the film is that it presents us with some good themes, but never delves deeply into any of them. Of course, over the span of 80 minutes, you can't delve much time into a lot of subjects, but I think if the film had been a little less "Hey, Look at these oddballs!" we could've had a better documentary that actually said something poignant.

Day 3: Nothing

Wow, I just watched another incredible movie. Today's entry is the 2003 film, Nothing, by Canadian filmmaker Vincenzo Natali, who made the also brilliant Cube.

Nothing is an absurdist comedy about two friends since childhood. You have Dave (Dave Hewlitt) and Andrew (Andrew Miller). Both friends are having one of the worst days of their lives when they realize that the problem isn't with themselves, but with them; that is, the outside world. As the outside world is threatening to crash in on their lives yet again and destroy all that they have, they "hate" away the world.

Suddenly, their house is floating in a totally white void. There is literally nothing. They only have each other, the house and whatever was in the house when the world disappeared.

While for most people, this would be a horrible nightmare, for Dave and Andrew, this is paradise. In this nothingness, they are completely free to do whatever they wish. The expectations and rules of the outside world no longer apply and out heroes are no longer the butts of life's cosmic joke.

I know I've harped on Hollywood flicks on the last two days' movies. I don't mean to keep criticizing, but Nothing's ending took me by surprise because it didn't have the conventional Hollywood ending you would expect. In it's own way, the ending presented in this movie is more authentic to the idea of the movie. I'd go into more detail, but I'd rather not spoil it.

Nothing is a fine film and I can't wait to see what Vincenzo Natali gives us next.

Day 2: Unagi (The Eel)

Day two’s movie is Unagi (The Eel). It’s a Japanese film directed by Shohei Imamura in 1997 and doesn’t feature any Yakuza, giant robots, cyborg samurai, or penis-tentacle monsters. If you can get around these serious deficiencies, you’ll be enjoying an otherwise fine film about a man dealing with the demons of his past.

Takuro Yamashita (Koji Yakusho) is a white-collar office drone who likes to take all-night fishing trips. On his way home, he reads a letter detailing that his wife is seeing another man when he’s out fishing. That night, he decides to return home from fishing quite early and finds his wife entwined with another man. In a fit of passion, Yamashita takes a kitchen knife to his wife and then turns himself in to the police.

Eight years later, Yamashita is out on parole. He starts life anew as a barber in a small village under the guidance of his parole officer/reverend. He spends his time quietly cutting hair during the day and fishing at night. He also keeps an eel he caught while in prison as a pet. “They know how to listen,” he says when asked why he prefers the eel’s company.

One day while out fishing, he finds an unconscious woman named Keiko Hattori (Misa Shimizu). It turns out she was attempting suicide. She comes to live at the temple and help out around the barber shop. Of course, this brings up the past that Yamashita has been trying to forget and put behind him. Let’s not forget also Keiko’s demons that drove her to suicide.

Unagi is a well crafted film that builds slowly to its climax. This seems to be the usual case for films from the East. You don’t find so much of the typical Hollywood three-act structure inherent in mainstream Western fare. In fact, Yamashita doesn’t really do much in the way of making the choices; he’s pretty passive for the most part. It’s the outside world that forces him to confront his past and move on.

Eventually, we all must come to terms with who we are and what we’ve done. Some of us won’t be able to accept what we find, but as Unagi shows, it doesn’t matter where we come from, we’re all magnificent eels.

Day 1: Out of the Past

First up: Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 film noir classic, Out of the Past, starring Robert Mitchum.

Jeff Bailey (Mitchum) is the owner of a gas station in a small California town. One day, while out fishing with his girlfriend, Ann (Virginia Huston), he’s visited by a shady guy named Joe (Paul Valentine). Apparently, Bailey has a mysterious past that had laid buried for a few years. Joe tells Bailey to go and see Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). On the drive to Sterling’s place, Bailey tells Ann about his past and how he had double-crossed Sterling.

Upon meeting Sterling again, it turns out that Bailey must do a job for him to be considered squared up. It turns out that some tax information is being held for less than legitimate purposes and Sterling would like Bailey to retrieve it. Of course, being a film noir, complications ensue.

Out of the Past is one of those wonderful noirs that plays like you’re reading a 40’s pulp. The dialogue is crisp and loaded with the classic pulp slang: guns are rods, women are dames, etc. What’s interesting is that Bailey speaks like an average Joe unless he’s dealing with the shady characters from his past.

Jane Greer is stunning as Kathy Moffat, the femme fatale that is the catalyst for everything getting complicated for our hero. In true noir fashion, you never know whose side she’s on or what her game is. Of course, in these movies, everyone is on a team of one.

What I liked about this movie is that the plot is well constructed (and quite convoluted) and that the story is gripping without any huge action scenes or effect sequences. We don’t even get a chase scene. I don’t know if the average modern audience would even go for a movie like this anymore. Out of the Past does require some attention span; there’s no shocking action every couple of minutes to keep you in the seat. Films like this make you complicit in your entertainment.

Out of the Past is definitely worth the watching.

Iron Man

Okee dokee, I went to see Iron Man last night, adding my few bucks into the opening weekend gross, helping guarantee a sequel. (They're already talking about Iron Man 2 in 2010.)

I'll spare you a long review since there are already a million of them. Short story: It was pretty awesome.

It's your standard origin story and the story arc of Tony Stark becoming Iron Man is great. The fight scenes are awesome. You're getting exactly what you want for your ticket.

I gotta say, Downey Jr. was the perfect choice for Stark. After watching it, I don't think they could've picked a better actor.

I Am Legend's original ending!

FirstShowing.net has posted the original ending of the Will Smith flick, I Am Legend, that will be included when the DVD is released in a few weeks. Here's the link: http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/03/05/must-watch-i-am-legends-original-ending-this-is-amazing/

Those of you who know me know that I Am Legend has always been my dream project. The themes in the book are ones I usually hit on when attempting dramatic works, so it's always really grabbed me. When I saw the flick, I was disappointed. The movie is good, but the way Hollywood cocked it up (the project was in development hell for many years) just betrayed the book and paradigm-shifting concept.

The original ending is amazing. While still not close to the book's plot, the original ending at least stays thematically correct. It's worth watching.

I feel cheated that this was not the ending I saw in the theater.

The Signal & Be Kind Rewind

It's kind of funny how the universe works sometimes. I've often said that if you pay attention, the world is trying to tell you something. Maybe it's some sort of cosmic thing, maybe it's just our very human capability to find patterns in chaos. I don't know and I don't really care. (Leave that to the philosophers.) What matters is that I get the point therein and do something with it.

Over the last two weeks, I saw The Signal and Be Kind Rewind. Both deal with the influence of media and human connectedness. In one, the media is an overwhelming presence that drives people to kill, and the other shows people making media for themselves and growing as a community.

The Signal is a triptych of short films about a mysterious signal emanating from every TV, radio, and phone that causes people to kill each other. Ironically, everyone thinks everyone else is crazy and the reasons they use to justify murder make a bizarre sort of sense to themselves. The eponymous signal is inescapable. TVs and radios just come on with the broadcast playing.

Be Kind Rewind is about two guys remaking older movies with a VHS camcorder after a magnetized Jack Black inadvertently erases the store's stock of VHS movies. The self-made remakes become a hit and the people in the neighborhood get in on the action. Of course, the studios come in to piss all over the parade.

The reason I bring this up is because I feel like I've been taken too much with the mass media. I've been watching too much TV. I've been reading Digg way too much. I would be totally vulnerable to some sort of killer transmission.

I haven't been working on my back-burner projects. I haven't been making my own media. I keep worrying about finding the next gig so I can pay my bills. I keep living in this weird, fear-based state instead of embracing the whole "do what you love and the money will follow" edict. This kind of progression will only continue to lead me away from the work I wanted to do when I got into this whole industry in the first place.

I'm shifting gears. I'm not sure of how I'm going to get to my destination just yet, but the journey should be pretty cool.

It's official: I freaking hate Michael Bay.

So I had the unfortunate experience of watching The Island the other night. This makes for the third pile of garbage I've seen from Michael Bay; the other two being Transformers and Armageddon.

The thing that really pisses me off about Bay's movies is that everything happens so fast, there's so much spectacle of chases and fights and explosions and sfx, that people watch this tripe and think it's gold, never realizing that they just ate a huge plate of steaming fuck. Second to that is Bay's complete neglect to take his movies into any area where the situations or issues posed could get into any deep contemplation. Of course, who can talk about issues when there's a helicopter/car chase to be had?

Let's take The Island, for example. A huge population of people cloned and grown ultimately for perfect organ replacements for their DNA-original masters. They've no idea about their purpose. They're told a lie about a worldwide contamination and if they're lucky, they win a lottery to go to "the island": the only contamination-free zone on Earth to help repopulate the world. In reality winning the lottery means certain death as they're to be carved up for transplantation.

Yes, farming clones as organ replacements is wrong since the clones have a consciousness and sentience, but that's not an argument that many would counter. It's easy to be on the side of the happy little clones and their cutesy innocence. We can all agree on this and pat ourselves on the back for being humanitarians.

The thing that Bay brings up and skirts around is with Scarlett Johansson's character. Her original has recently suffered a horrible car wreck and has 48 hours to live unless she gets the transplants from her clone. Although she knows that her original is dying, she does nothing and doesn't even seem to care about the fact. Even after speaking via videophone with her original's very young child, she never contemplates her purpose for being: keeping her original alive.

I'm not saying that Scarlett's character should've sacrificed herself or not. I'm saying that you had a delicious ethical issue here and instead of ever devoting any time to it, we get another helicopter chase, some running from mercenaries, and a campy scene where the lead mercenary judges the owner of the cloning company as an unethical man. (A mercenary who saw nothing wrong with firing automatic weapons and bombs in crowded civilian areas, mind you.) Bay dropped the ball.

Add to that all of Bay's awkward expositions, needless secondary characters bloating the runtime to more than 2 hours, and an almost fetishistic love for all things military, and you have a celluloid shit sandwich. You get the equivalent of the teenager who thinks he's all grown up: able to recognize the complexities of adult life, but unable to deal or address any of them.

Summer flick round-up

This past month has been a busy one for yours truly as I worked on a few projects that required a lot of HD work. Good stuff, good money. Makes me happy to earn.

Anyway, here's a list of flicks I saw this summer with a brief impression of each:

Knocked Up: I know it was a big hit, but I'm tired of clichéd gender war humor. Women don't get guys. Guys don't get women. Jeez. The lead guy is a lazy stoner and the the lead girl is an ambitious careerist? What a shock! At least it had plenty of funny moments.

Sunshine: Wow. Boyle and Garland should team up forever. The ending confused me a bit, but the film was amazing. This shows that not every sci-fi flick needs to be about quasi-goths shooting each other.

Simpsons Movie: Why did these past writers ever leave? Way funnier than the current show, the movie made me actually like the Simpsons again.

Ratatouille: While I thought that the "no stealing" moral was clumsily tacked on, this was just an amazing and fun film to watch. Brad Bird knows how to make an animated feature, that's for sure. Damn, I really loved this movie. I'll probably buy it when it comes out on DVD.

Bourne Ultimatum: Gives you what you expect to receive. Lots of chase sequences and a few good fights. Plot was kind of lame, but this is all about the action, not the story. That beaing said, there's nothing wrong with taking in the spectacle. D.W. Griffith did say film was all about the chase sequence.

Sicko: Wow. Reviewed in another post.

Transformers: Shit sandwich. Reviewed in another post.

Review: SiCKO

As anyone who's looked at the mainstream cable news or read a political blog lately knows, Michael Moore's new documentary, SiCKO , just recently came out. Before the film even made it’s debut, people on both sides of the political fence were lobbing attacks at each other over the issue that SiCKO raises: The American Healthcare system is fundamentally fucked.

As far as this documentary goes, it's pretty standard Michael Moore fare. Moore takes a huge issue, puts a human face on it to show how Corporate America is failing the common man, and then pulls a few pranks to show how totally screwed up the whole situation really is.

Moore starts out showing a man without health insurance literally stitch his own knee wound shut because he can't afford the medical cost of an ER visit. The sad thing is that this isn't as grim as the film gets. Moore spends about five minutes on two people without insurance and then informs us that SiCKO isn't about them. In fact, SiCKO is about those who do have insurance and how the insurance companies have failed them.

After Moore presents some of the tragedies that a corrupt system has caused, he then proceeds to show us the medical systems of Canada, England, and France. In each case, the country provides universal healthcare coverage paid for by taxes. Moore then tackles the myths that our government has propagated about “socialized medicine” for years such as people being turned away, operation quotas, lack of doctors, etc. In each case, he shows that the myth is only a myth.

Finally, Moore ends the film with his set-piece: taking ill 9/11 rescue workers to Guatanamo Bay and demanding that they be provided “with the same healthcare that Al-Quaeda gets. No more, no less.” Of course, no help comes, so Moore gets them treated at no out-of-pocket expense in that most hated country, Cuba.

What strikes me most about the film isn't the film itself (although I was movedto tears of rage at how horrible our own system is when we could have a system that provides for all) but the polemic that has erupted over it. This is not a political issue, or at least, it shouldn't be. This is a humanity issue.

We're all very dependent on each other, despite what our rugged-individualist culture may want to preach. As such, we have to take care of each other if we want to continue as a species. People shouldn't have to choose which severed fingers to save based on their savings. People shouldn't be forced into poverty because of a cancer that developed. People shouldn't let a disease go untreated because they have to pay their mortgages. Even more so, the trust and money that people put into the healthcare providers should pay off when the unfortunate happens and they desperately need that care. Maybe, I'm just a goddamned pinko, but I think that the health of people is more important than the second homes of these millionaire HMO CEOs who profit off of denying treatment to those ailing.

All in all, I hope that this film helps turn the tide toward America adopting universal healthcare coverage for all. Unfortunately, Moore has been so demonized by the right-wing media that his film will most likely be another case of preaching to the converted, but let's hope that we can one day soon walk into a hospital without fearing bankruptcy.

Review: Transformers

On the 4th of July, I saw Michael Bay's newest recruitment ad for the USMC, Transformers. After the soul-crushing experience of watching this god-awful dreck, all I really wanted was those two and half hours of my life back.

Let's just get the requisite plot summary out of the way before I try to relate why I feel like a part of me died inside. Marines in the Qatar (a monarchy that punishes dissenters) encounter a giant robot that can transform into a helicopter. In the USA, a nerdy teen, Sam (Shia LaBouf), is special and unique enough to warrant soon becoming friends with more giant robots that can transform into vehicles. Complications ensue and giant robots battle each other while Marines shoot at said robots and Sam gets enough character to overcome his nerdiness, get the girl (Megan Fox), and attain the honorary rank of soldier from Josh Duhamel. The end credits roll while you feel cheated and Hasbro's shareholders masturbate with enthusiasm.

That being said, this long cartoon just didn't do it for me. One thing that could've helped would have been if someone told Bay that he isn't funny. Then maybe I wouldn't have had to endure one crappy gag after another. Here's a classic from the movie: a little girl clutching the requisite stuffed animal watches a 30-foot tall robot step out of the family pool. She says to the towering mechanoid, "Are you the Tooth Fairy?" Are you effing kidding? Sadly, this is the best joke in a whole movie whose jokes are so old and tired that they make Vaudeville humor seem cutting-edge.

As one might expect in a summer action flick, none of the characters are even worth caring about. I didn't care about Captain Lennox (Duhamel) and the fact that his wife and baby were back in the states, nor did I care about Sam and his lame attempts to impress the shallow-teen-hottie-who-isn't-shallow-and-holy-crap!-she-can-fix-cars love interest. I also snoozed through the boring scenes with Jon Voigt as the Secretary of Defense and the computer nerds deciphering alien signals. No one in the film was a three-dimensional character.

Most disturbing in this piece of propaganda is that the Autobots speak English while the Decepticons speak their native language. After a couple of scenes of Marines admonishing their Latino team member to "speak English" it becomes apparent that only true Americans speak English. The Decepticons become almost like foreign terrorists as they infiltrate military bases and even Airforce One. (The Latino Marine dies in battle.)

I could go on about stupid plot choices, hokey sloganeering, etc. but I want to get to the heart of this: this film offers nothing to say. Call me crazy, but I want more to a movie than just spectacle. A film should teach me something.

While discussing this with a friend of mine, he told me that it was a dumb, escapist summer action flick and that I shouldn't go in expecting some arthouse-quality film. To quote, "I wanted to see giant robots fighting and that's what I got." That being said, I can only retort that the "it's a dumb flick" excuse isn't good enough. In the past, we got great films like Hostel 2, Grindhouse, Night Watch, Spider-Man, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, etc. that all were spectacle-heavy, but had something genuine to say and share with us.

The problem is that we keep buying into the tease of the specatacle that the film offers, but never hold the filmmakers accountable for the lack of substance. Unfortunately, this movie will make a ton of cash and Hollywood will keep pumping out shit like this.

I wish I had gone to see Ratatouille instead. I'm going to have to go see Herzog's The Great Escape now. I have to feed my soul with good stuff.

Review: Hostel 2

Whenever you have a movie like Eli Roth’s Hostel 2 get released, you inevitably have the critics decrying the film as nothing more than pointless “torture-porn” and then suggest that we, the audience, should be ashamed for plunking down our $10 and chomping popcorn throughout the spectacle of dismemberment and other wholesome amusements.

While I do concede that there are a lot of really bad movies that feature such forms of body-horror and have nothing else to offer in terms of having anything to say, this has never been the case with Eli Roth. When I saw Roth’s first feature, Cabin Fever, I knew that this was going to be a director to watch over the coming years. Roth’s tale of camping friends and the fragility of that friendship in a generation that grew up never knowing a world without AIDS was complex and poignant, all within the oft-maligned splatter genre.

Then came Hostel, a film about America’s role in a larger global society. Roth depicted a scenario in which a poor European country made its bread and butter on selling wealthy European businessmen the opportunity to hack upon arrogant, American youth. At a time when Americans foster no goodwill in the larger global society, this film played on the fears arising from the disdain our country had fostered in the past few years.

Now comes Roth’s Hostel 2, his finest feature to date, where he turns his critical lens as a scathing indictment of the Upper Class.

Hostel 2 is about an American art student, Beth, who is studying in Rome with her friends Lorna and Whitney. Finishing their lesson, they decide to head off to Prague for the weekend. Unfortunately, the army of “gross guys” on the night train put them off and they get talked into visiting the wonderful town of Slovakia, home to fabulous hot springs, extravagant harvest festivals, and the best murder factory you ever saw.

Intercut with the story of Beth and her pals, is the story of Todd and Stuart, two American businessmen who win the online auction to be the ones to kill Whitney and Beth. (Lorna gets dispatched by another lucky bidder.) These two guys go into this thinking that having killed someone will give them a psychological, competitive edge in the business world. As the film progresses, Stuart and Todd make their way through the hunting club initiation and the girls get abducted one by one until both meet in a shocking and bloody climax.

By making the two soon-to-be killers American, Roth takes the focus away from the the nationality of the victims and murderers and focuses us more on the disparity between the classes. Here are the wealthy business types hacking up the lower-class backpacking kids. Their money buys them the experience to take a human life. In this case, life is literally worth less than commerce. In one scene the lives of homeless children are so undervalued that taking the life of a child is seen as almost a birthright.

While other reviewers may point and shout about how films such as this are horrible for depicting life and cheap and worthless, the real point is that Roth is showing us the mindset of the modern business model. Everything is for sale and for those who are wealthy enough, the social contract of morality doesn’t even apply. Why play by the rules when you can buy off the system?

If you can stomach the gore (which, in my opinion, wasn't that hardcore), then Hostel 2 is a great choice for a film to go see.

Review: Brand Upon the Brain!

Last night was the final showing of Guy Maddin's latest cinematic offering, Brand Upon the Brain! I had very much wanted to see it the opening weekend when the Music Box had the orchestra, Foley artists, castrato, benshi, and Crispin Glover to provide the sound. Thankfully, it doesn't matter how you dress up Maddin, because his genius will always shine through.

Brand Upon the Brain! is the second film from Maddin in which the tale is faux-autobiographical. It concerns a middle-aged Guy, who is now a world-renowned house painter, returning to his childhood home (a lighthouse doubling as an orphanage) to give everything two good coats of paint as instructed in a letter from his estranged mother.

Guy starts slathering on the coats of paint, covering up every crack in the walls as well as his remembered past. Guy then flashbacks to when he was a child. He runs and plays on the lighthouse island, always under the vigilant, ever-watchful eye of his mother. One day, he encounters Wendy Hale, teen detective/harpist. Young Guy is in love and helps her with her investigation. Over time, the traditional Guy Maddin themes of complicated lust, bizarre love triangles, and denied passion all come into play.

Brand, along with Maddin's other "autobiographical" effort, Cowards Bend the Knee, marks a real experimental approach to Maddin's storytelling. The image quality stays very grainy throughout, as well as high-contrast. It's as if Guy's memories are very black & white morally, but the recollections are hazy from 30 years' time. The editing is rapid, with character movement being highly treated, looking almost like stills being projected in a flip-book procession. I'm not quite sure what Maddin's intention with this editing approach is, but damn if it doesn't look cool.

Brand was an enjoyable film. Being Maddin fan of a few years now, I was overjoyed to see this and see Maddin furthering his work and aesthetic into more avant-garde territory. For the first-time Maddin viewer, I would suggest something more accessible, such as The Saddest Music in the World or Tales From Gimli Hospital. For everyone else, see this flick.

Review: Ice Cream Man

Ice cream that stares back? What a frosty treat!

It's not very often that a movie is so fucking awful that I cannot bring myself to finish it, but Paul Norman's 1995 horror-comedy, Ice Cream Man just stunk. We're talking "The Critics Simply Say, 'Shit Sandwich'" levels of stink here.

Having just checked the film legacy of Paul Norman, I actually now feel sorry for him. The most recent thing on his IMDb page is a piece of pure class called Sperm Bitches. I didn't have the patience to go through all 118 of his films, but I'm going to take a guess and say that this was his only mainstream, non-porno movie.

I just imagine Paul Norman on the set of this flick every day freaking out about how good it needed to be so that he could become a "real" director and break free of the porno industry. I mean, he even went so far as to work with kids for this film! (I wonder if the parents knew of Paul Norman's CV.) I imagine Paul begrudgingly signing the film over to a straight-to-video distributor and then, when the movie tanked, he shrugs sadly to himself and sighs, "Back to money shots..."

As a side note, this film was co-written by David Dobkin, director of Wedding Crashers. I wonder if he and Paul trade Xmas cards.

On to my review of the first 45 minutes of what could've been 84 minutes of pure misery!

We start out with the obligatory flashback of why Gregory (Clint Howard) is a fucked-up individual. You know you're watching a flashback because everything is in black and white. Apparently, the ice cream man of Greg's youth is gunned down in a drug-related drive by shooting. This takes place in an upper middle-class neighborhood where as we all know, drug-related drive-by shootings are an epidemic. Young, soon-to-be-batshit-crazy Gregory is first to the body. He sits on the curb, takes a push-up pop out of the murdered ice cream man's hand and proceeds to eat it. When his mother rushes to him, all the boy can say is, "Who's going to bring the ice cream now?" This is how we're to know he's now officially batshit.

Flashback and some pointless exposition out of the way, we come to the present day where dorky children mob the ice cream truck. Gregory is now the ice cream man, but instead of getting shot in those upper middle-class drive-bys, he just keeps rats and other filth with the ice cream. You know the rats are bad thanks to the synthesizer score mimicking the Bernard Herrman soundtrack to Psycho. Apparently, Gregory's childhood trauma has only caused him to have a flagrant disregard for food sanitation laws instead of becoming a homicidal psychotic as the movie's poster would have us believe.

The heroes of this tale of suburban terror are four children. You have the small, nerdy kid named Small Paul. You have the fat kid named Tuna. Then you have two more kids, but they're pretty normal sized, so you forget them pretty quick. Actually, the kid playing Tuna isn't really fat, so throughout the movie, his shirts are all stuffed with padding in order to give him bulk. Fat suit technology wasn't available yet in 1995, so tons of toilet paper had to fill the girth. (Despite Tuna's "obesity", the character does an amazing amount of cardio with all the running and biking he does throughout the film. Must be a low metabolism.)

During the first half hour, we're led to believe that Gregory has murdered two children, but then it's revealed that both kids are alive. Instead, Gregory has only killed a creepy trash collector and a barking dog. He also puts an eyeball in a cop's ice cream cone.

So the kids that he's supposed to have killed aren't killed and we never see him kill anyone else during the 45 minutes I watched. What the hell's the point? Obviously, Gregory is no threat to our main heroes, so what are the stakes? Some E. Coli poisoning from rat turds in the butter pecan?

Having passed the halfway point and watching a very awkward pursuit in a carpeted grocery store (complete with Doug Llewelyn cameo), I just couldn't take any more. I just couldn't.

I had known that this film would be bad, but I hoped that it would be bad in a fun way, not bad in a "what the fuck were they thinking?" way. This is not worth seeing, even for camp. Who knows, maybe Paul Norman has improved in the past decade and Sperm Bitches is a cinematic masterpiece. Then again, maybe not.